Commentary and analysis to persuade people to become socialist and to act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a world of common ownership and free access. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not reformists with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

News Headlines Deliberately Hide Real Events

Foreign companies buying Africa's
fertile land

According to an ORDAF (The Association of Researchers in
Middle East and Africa), political events and terror news are
deliberately kept in the headlines to hide African land grabs by
Western countries. According to the ORDAF report, terrorist and
policital events are at the forefront of African nations while
millions of hectares of land are in the hands of foreign governments.
More than 60 million hectares of land that belongs to 80% of Africa
are quietly being exchanged hands through sales and rentals under the
smokescene of political instability and terror crises. In recent years powerful nations' have kept Africa in the
headlines with the incidences of Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda,
hiding behind these events while trading in international deals.

Going back to the 19th century, fertile lands was taken away from the
indigenous people of Africa and given to poor white farmers and that
today modern methods are now being applied on those lands. In
particular this exchange of lands between Europe, the US and Asia
have been far more widespread in the last 15 years. These mostly have
been covered up by keeping the issues of the Christian Sudanese, the
activities of Al-Qaeda's Maghreb activites, the Libyan-Egyptian
political crisis and the As-Shabab in Somalia in the headlines,
distracting from the secret deals and negotiations. As a result, by
keeping these news at the front and hiding behind these news, it has
been hoped that the purchase of the lands will be completed as soon
as possible.

In the report, very little countries with the exception
of North African Saharan countries of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria
and Morocco but not including Mauritania were the few countries that
did not rent out land over 10,000 hectares. The report says, “In
some countries, the sales were so high, that there were now groups of
observers researching the movement of land sales. At the top of the
list was Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo, Cameroon, Guinea, Zambia, Kenya,
Tanzania and Mozambique were being watched carefully. What was even
more striking was that with lands exchanging ownership, Western
countries imposed that the land that uses traditional agricultural
methods by the local people must be removed from all state authority.

It was also stated in the report that in recent years China had usage
rights of billions of hectares of African land. Whether through
rental or sales, China has - irrespective of the price it had to pay
– with land in its hand has strongly increased its opposition.
China had expressed interest in Ethiopia, Congo, Zimbabwe and
Cameroon which had closed off the land.